GitLab CI variables not working in Windows

GitLab CI/CD
1

I use variables to set the build directory for CI. This works well in linux however the variables do not get expanded on my windows runners. Below is a simple example.

In this example on linux $BUILD_DIR gets expanded correctly.
On windows a directory is created with the variable name ($BUILD_DIR) not the variable value.

Is this a bug I should report or am I doing something wrong?

variables: BUILD_DIR: $CI_PROJECT_DIR/$CI_BUILD_REF_NAME/build

testjob:
script:
- mkdir $BUILDDIR
2

I gues on windows you have to use something like mkdir %BUILDDIR%
the synthax for using environment variables in commands differs from platform to platform

3

Thanks for your response.

mkdir %BUILDDIR% does expand the variable correctly. However the command does not work because CI_PROJECT_DIR and BUILD_DIR contain / path separators instead of \

Any ideas on the best way to handle this without having to redefine all my variables based on platform?
Should I ping the gitlab guys about this via the issue tracker?

4

After looking into this a bit more I don’t know the correct syntax for concatenating a path in windows. If I include quotes in the variable definition the variables are not expanded. For example…

.platform_template: &WindowsPlatform
  variables:
    BUILD_DIR: "%CI_PROJECT_DIR%/%CI_BUILD_REF_NAME%/build"
    PLATFORM: 'windows'
  tags:
    - windows

Makes echo BUILD_DIR expand to %CI_PROJECT_DIR%/%CI_BUILD_REF_NAME%/build

If I remove the quotes…

.platform_template: &WindowsPlatform
  variables:
    BUILD_DIR: %CI_PROJECT_DIR%/%CI_BUILD_REF_NAME%/build
    PLATFORM: 'windows'
  tags:
    - windows

the yml is invalid because of the unknown character %

5

I switched to using a bash shell and everything is working better.

6

How do you make it to use bash instead of regular shell? I’ve installed the runner using “shell” options but it seems to not work well.

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